Today -100: December 17, 1925: ‘Tis now Ankara’s turn to speak

Two far-right German monarchists, one a petty criminal who loves him some Hitler and one a former mental patient, are arrested for a plot to assassinate Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann. One of them told a lawyer about it and the lawyer told the police.

The League of Nations gives Britain a mandate over Iraq and sets a border between it and Turkey, which is not best pleased and still claims Mosul, responding “‘Tis now Ankara’s turn to speak.” Britain thinks there probably won’t be a war with Turkey. Probably. 

New York City Mayor-Elect Jimmy Walker pledges to make NY a clean city. Supposedly there’s been an influx of gamblers since the election, believing NY would be an open city.

Sir Basil Thomson, head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch during the Great War, is arrested in Hyde Park “committing an act in violation of public decency” with a Miss Thelma de Lava, which doesn’t sound like a real name but it is the one she gives the police. He also gives a fake name; both are bailed but fail to appear as ordered.

The Kentucky Court of Appeals awards the black servants of “turfman” John T. Hughes the money he left them in his will, rejecting the claims of his (white) relatives. So Ellen Davis, a former slave in her 80s, is now the richest black woman in the South. Her son, who is also Hughes’s son, also gets a legacy.

The State Democratic Women’s Association of Texas will not support Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson for re-election. Nor will the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. I don’t think any women’s group supports her. The president of the Texas branch of the League of Women Voters is annoyed that people outside Texas think Ferguson’s election was a victory for women.

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy is published.

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Today -100: December 16, 1925: With a friendly smile, respectful bow and doffing of the hat

Special constables seize their barracks in Belfast to demand compensation for their units being disbanded under the Irish agreement. Other cops in Derry & elsewhere in Northern Ireland refuse to hand in arms and equipment.

The Texas Textbook Commission removes references to evolution from a biology textbook.

People in Edineţi, a town in Bessarabia, which was annexed by Romania in 1918, will be required to salute Romanian officers, “with a friendly smile, respectful bow and doffing of the hat.” In the meantime, the Town Commandant’s hat will be paraded through the streets on a stick so the Edineţihoovians can practice the smiling, bowing, and doffing.

The Nacionalista & Democratic Parties of the Philippines Legislature agree to join together to fight for Filipino autonomy, in response to Coolidge’s State of the Union call for strengthening the power of the governor-general against the Legislature (and also the veto by Gov.-Gen. Leonard Wood last week of a bill for an independence plebiscite, but the NYT kinda missed that one).

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Today -100: December 15, 1925: Oh sure it looks easy now that you’ve explained it

Kip and Alice Rhinelander have scattered to the winds. Not the same winds, of course. He’s making sure she can’t serve him to sue for support, she’s, I dunno, escaping reporters? Anyway, the Ku Klux Klan are searching for her in Florida hotels in which she’s thought to be staying. Not ominous at all. (Update: she’s actually still in New Rochelle; the NYT helpfully provides her address.)

The Republican Senate leadership decide not to ostracize newly elected young Robert La Follette Jr. after all. They recognize him as a Republican and put him on three Senate committees.

Harry Houdini’s new show opens at the 44th Street Theatre. The entire second act is devoted to exposing the ticks used by mediums. Some of the audience members are annoyed that he asked questions of them based on letters his assistant took from coats in the cloakroom.

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Today -100: December 14, 1925: His favorite

Headline of the Day -100:

Oops. 9 years old. “Rose, he said, had always been his favorite.” His less-favored children must be wondering what’s in store for them.

Incidentally, Rudyard Kipling has been sick, but is now on the mend. This has been worth something like a dozen news articles over the last couple of weeks. It’s always a little weird when the NYT mounts a death-watch. Kipling won’t actually die anytime soon.

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Today -100: December 13, 1925: Of cars, cavaliers, empires, and mosques

Yugoslav Prime Minister Nikola Pašić’s car runs over and kills a teacher. Later in the day, the acting foreign minister’s car also runs over a woman. Ice, they say, and definitely not some sort of sick competition.

Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot sets an execution date for William Cavalier, who was 14 when convicted of murdering his grandmother.

It is hinted that Mussolini might promote Italy to an empire rather than a mere kingdom in the new year. The new emperor would, of course, be the spineless Victor Emmanuel, not Moose, perhaps the reason this never came to pass.

A mosque is being built in Paris, more or less the first in mainland France. The Grande Mosquée de Paris will open next year in the 5th arrondissement. 

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Today -100: December 12, 1925: No additional punishment would act as a deterrent to those who would preach an erroneous doctrine of government

The League of Nations invites the US (and other non-members Germany and Russia) to join a committee to prepare for a disarmament conference. 

NY Gov. Al Smith pardons Benjamin Gitlow, the former Socialist state assemblyperson convicted of “criminal anarchy” in 1920 for stuff published in a newspaper of which he was business manager. Smith says he’s been “sufficiently punished for a political crime”* and in prison “has meekly submitted to the sovereign power of the State,” which I’d consider an insult if anyone said it about me. Smith says “no additional punishment would act as a deterrent to those who would preach an erroneous doctrine of Government.” Gitlow will run for governor next year as the Workers Party candidate. The Comintern will expel him from the Communist Party in 1929 as insufficiently radical and yadda yadda yadda, he’ll turn anti-Communist by the late ‘30s and write I Confess: The Truth About American Communism in 1940.

*I failed to notice the significance of this, but Gitlow will point out next week that Smith “admitted in his pardon that there is such a thing in this country as imprisonment for political offenses.”

In Prussia, Robert Grütte-Lehder of Gen. Ludendorff’s Nazi-adjacent German Völkisch Freedom Party (DVFP) is on trial for murdering Heinrich Dammers of that same group in 1923 for supposedly passing party secrets to the Communists. This is the first Berlin trial for the “Feme murders” (Fememorde – punishment murders) in which far-right groups cleaned house. c.30 officers and such are said to be awaiting similar trials. Grütte-Lehder, “resembling an east side gangster,” accuses DVFP party leaders and Reichstag members of inducing him to kill Dammers, giving him a letter – an actual letter – authorizing it.  (Update: I think it actually just tells him to establish order in the Stettin branch of the party, which Grütte-Lehder says amounts to the same thing.)

The Italian Chamber of Deputies passes Mussolini’s labor law abolishing all labor unions except Fascist “syndicates,” which he says are different from Socialist labor unions in that they are based on class collaboration. Strikes will be banned in favor of mandatory arbitration. The Duck tells the Chamber that this should be considered a war measure “because I consider the Italian nation in a permanent state of war.” “Even as controversies are not permitted at the front in wartime, so now we must realize the maximum national efficiency.” A NYT editorial gives this, um, illuminating analysis: “Italy’s new labor laws would indicate that the hen of dictatorship has been brooding over the eggs of radicalism and, oddly enough, has hatched out chickens shaped in the Fascist image.”

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Today -100: December 11, 1925: Punishing rebels

Republicans in the House of Representatives who didn’t back Nicholas Longworth for Speaker or didn’t vote for a new House rule to kill bills not supported by the Republican Party leadership – mostly Wisconsin Progressives – are ousted from committee chairmanships; some are expelled from their committees.

 

Women’s organizations in New York want a minimum marriage age, which is currently 12 years old with parental consent under common law.

Lady Nancy Astor, MP offers to pay to send any British Communist (and his family) (she assumes it’s a he) who thinks Soviet Russia is so great to Russia if they will live there two years to enjoy “the joys of Bolshevist rule.” She is not offering to pay their return fare.

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Today -100: December 10, 1925: Budget!

Coolidge calls for a budget of $3,494,222,308. This would include $76m for aviation and $22m for prohibition enforcement. But he wants states to pay for their own damn roads.

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Today -100: December 9, 1925: In the right direction

Calvin Coolidge sends Congress his State of the Union address (not yet called that). He calls for joining the World Court because “Wars do not spring into existence. They arise from small incidents and trifling irritations which can be adjusted by an international court.” He wants to send power from the federal government to the states, but mostly, he says, “we are going in the right direction. The country does not appear to require radical departures from the policies already adopted so much as it needs a further extension of these policies and the improvement of details.” He says negroes “should be protected from all violence,” without using the word “lynching.” One state he doesn’t want to send more power to is the Philippines, where he wants the governor general to have even more power “so that he will not be so dependent upon the local legislative body to render effective our efforts to set an example of the sound administration and good government, which is so necessary for the preparation of the Philippine people for self-government under ultimate independence.”

France arrests 3 Englishmen as leaders of a spy circle trying to steal French aviation secrets. This may or may not be retaliation after the British supposedly arrested French spies trying to steal British aviation secrets.

Headline of the Day -100:

Tick tick tick tick...

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Today -100: December 8, 1925: Of stranglers, pearl-colored spats, and uniforms

Russia arrests 15 Czarist-era executioners, who between them strangled 500+ revolutionaries secretly in a cellar. I’m surprised the arrests didn’t happen much earlier.

The 69th session of Congress opens (not counting the special session back in March). And the big thing you need to know about it, evidently, is that Robert La Follette Jr. took the oath of office wearing pearl-colored spats, which “were commented on smilingly by old Senators, who recalled that the elder La Follette also was partial to spats but of a less conspicuous shade.” Nicholas Longworth, husband of Alice Roosevelt, daughter of Theodore, takes over as speaker of the House. Alice looks on from the visitors’ gallery, wearing... oh, who cares what she was wearing. She is sitting next to Mary Borah, wife of Sen. William Borah, the actual father of the child Alice gave birth to in February. Awkward. 

The increasingly fascist Society of Awakening Hungarians adopts a uniform, much like the Italian Fascists, and adopts a battle axe as their emblem, this, I think:

There may be push-back from the government on the whole uniform thing.

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Today -100: December 7, 1925: Of wars, barbaric noises, and outrages

Former Texas Gov. James Ferguson writes in his weekly newspaper Ferguson’s Forum, mostly known for featuring advertisements from companies wanting government contracts and other favors, “The war is on.”

Siegfried Wagner, son of composer Richard, calls jazz “barbaric noise” and “nigger rhythmics” turned out by “half-civilized negroes.” In 1913 Kaiser Wilhelm banned army officers from dancing the tango, “this nigger grotesque.” Everyone’s a critic.

At a meeting to protest “the dismemberment of Ireland,” Éamon de Valera calls the decision not to change the border between North & South Ireland the greatest outrage ever committed by England against the Irish people. Surely he can think of a few greater outrages committed by England against the Irish people.

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Today -100: December 6, 1925: I do and I don’t

Texas Attorney Gen. Dan Moody, who is not a fan of the governors Ferguson, seems to kill the idea of a special session to impeach Gov. Miriam, saying it’s against public policy to have a privately funded session. So a special session could only be held if the legislators pay their own expenses, and we know that ain’t gonna happen. But if the impeachment movement is sputtering, it’s probably because the governors Ferguson have been leaking that they won’t be running for re-election (she will, though, and will lose humiliatingly to Dan Moody). Also, the grand jury has yet to weigh in.

Mussolini calls for schools to be “inspired by the ideals of Fascism.” Aren’t they all? “It is not necessary to burden the mind with infinite notions which can never be remembered, which leave nothing worth while.”

German Chancellor Hans Luther and his Cabinet resign. No one else wants the job, so Luther will probably retain it.

The Rhinelander v. Rhinelander jury refuses to annul their marriage, denying Kip’s charge that Alice R. tricked him into marriage by racial fraud. Alice will now demand alimony and attorneys’ fees. A reporter asks if she still loves her husband and she says “I do and I don’t.” Jurors insist to reporters that racial prejudice did not enter into their deliberations.

So the Rhinelanders are still married but won’t, I think, ever meet again. His lawyers will appeal the ruling for a couple of year and fail. In 1929 she’ll sue Kip’s father Philip for alienation of affections (Kip was legally obligated to support his wife, but didn’t). He’ll try to get a Nevada divorce, but New York State won’t recognize it because she was not present. She will then file suit in NY for separation, finally forcing the family to negotiate with her, paying her $31,500 (most of which went to her lawyers, as is the custom) plus $3,800 a year in exchange for an NDA and giving up the right to use the name “Rhinelander” (it will, however, appear on her grave stone). Leonard died in 1936 at 32 of pneumonia. He didn’t re-marry; neither did Alice, who died in 1989.

W. E. B. DuBois will point out that “if Rhinelander had used this girl as concubine or prostitute, white America would have raised no word of protest; white periodicals would have printed no headlines, white ministers would have said no single word. It is when he legally and decently marries the girl that Hell breaks loose and literally tears the pair apart.”

There’s a detail I haven’t managed to shoehorn in yet: 40 years before all this, Kip’s uncle William (brother of Philip) married an Irish servant, to a horrified social and familial reaction that will sound familiar. The family sent a lawyer to try to bribe his wife to go back to Ireland. William shot the lawyer in the shoulder, which resulted in his death 6 months later, but William was never charged.

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Today -100: December 5, 1925: Of verdicts and family traditions

The jury in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander reaches a verdict! In 12 hours! We don’t know what it is!

NY Gov. Al Smith becomes a grandfather (assuming he wasn’t already one). The news is a surprise because no one knew that his son Arthur eloped last year when he was 17 and a student at the Christian Brothers Academy. His older brother Al Jr. also eloped last year.

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Today -100: December 4, 1925: Of loans, indemnities, borders, and textbooks

Belgium is negotiating a major loan in New York to pay off its war debt, and Belgians will be asked, under a proposal by the president of the Bank of Brussels, to work free for a half hour per week at overtime rates, the money going to service the debt.

A League of Nations commission determines that Greece is entirely to blame for the recent War of the Stray Dog and must pay Bulgaria an indemnity of 20 million levas, which is the equivalent of some money, for material losses; it also recommends an additional 10 million levas for injuries and deaths of soldiers.

The Irish Free State, Northern Ireland & Great Britain come to an agreement on the Irish border, which is not to change it and indeed to suppress the report of the boundary commission. Ulster intransigence wins again, I guess. As part of the overall agreement, Britain will stop trying to get the Free State to pay any of Britain’s war debt (disputes over how to calculate it means the Free State has never actually paid any of it), and Ireland will take over payment of compensation for the Civil War, which means it has to pay for its own oppression (as was the custom).

Texas Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson’s opponents have another potential ground for impeachment: a possibly corrupt deal for elementary school spelling books, which was made after she appointed her husband to the Textbook Commission, which then mysteriously awarded the contract to the highest bidder.

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Today -100: December 3, 1925: We don’t want hats!

Gen. Miguel Primo de Rivera supposedly gives up the dictatorship of Spain and dissolves the “Directorate” he set up in ‘23. He does not restore the Cortes or the Constitution or end press censorship. 

Dueling is still a thing in Germany, or at any rate Prussia. Junker aristo Bogislav von Somnitz is sentenced to 2½ years in prison for having killed a duelee in one of four (4, count ’em, 4) duels he held in a single day. The other 3 duelists will get 6 months in prison and the seconds 1 month. Somnitz had been assaulted at a hunting party by the baron who hosted it and the other 3 because of his refusal to participate in monarchist plots and to hide insurgents on his property. Naturally he challenged them. The first 3 duels were bloodless, mostly because the sun hadn’t come up yet, but it had by the time he faced Lt. von Kohl, who bled to death. The judge rules that Somnitz was not guilty of premeditated murder because he shot at his opponents’ legs and anyway the insult to his honor required a duel in response. 

A Turkish man who put up posters objecting to the government’s ban on fezes is hanged. Elsewhere, a mob demonstrates in front of the governor’s house in Marash shouting “We don’t want hats!”

Young Kip Rhinelander’s lawyer, retired NY Supreme Court justice Isaac Mills, sums up. Some quotes:

You might as well bury this young man six feet deep in the soil of the old churchyard where his early American ancestors sleep as to condemn him to be chained for eternity to this mulatto woman.

There is not a father among you – and I tried to fill this jury box with fathers [The jury is all-male, as was almost always the case in NY until jury duty became mandatory for women in the ‘70s] – who would not rather see his son in his casket than wedded to this mulatto woman. There is room in this fair county for blacks as well as whites, but the decent blacks object to this marriage, as do the decent whites.

He will hail your verdict if you find a verdict for him, as a person on the steps of the scaffold welcomes a reprieve from the governor.

He admits Alice was humiliated by “that indecent exhibition in the jury room,” but 

with the buoyance of her race she will regain her spirits. ... Let her gain a husband of her own race and find happiness with him [like her sister Emily,] who without vaulting ambition wed within her own color and kind.

Vaulting ambition is the worst kind of ambition.

Mills says Kip had the intelligence of a 14- or 15-year-old when he met Alice and a “physical infirmity” – is that how he’s referring to stuttering? – so he fell under her spell, and “mind you, women of her race mature earlier.”

He calls on the jury to free poor Kip “from this horrid, unnatural, absurd, terrible union.”

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Today -100: December 2, 1925: Of occupations and research

British troops evacuate (finally) the North Rhineland (Cologne and environs). Unlike the French when they de-occupied the Ruhr, the British are doing it without making any triumphalist fuss.

Commerce Sec Herbert Hoover complains at the lack of spending in the US on fundamental scientific research. He claims we spend ten times as much on cosmetics.

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Today -100: December 1, 1925: They must think I’m a bird

Texas Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson refuses to call a special session of the Legislature, calling those requesting it “wolves” who “want to gather here and tear me apart.” “They tried to camouflage [the special session] as an inquiry into the foot and mouth disease and tick eradication. They must think I’m a bird. It’s my feet, my mouth, and my eradication they want.” Her feet? Her mouth?

Today the governor – Jim, not Ma, who quit for the day at noon – sat in the governor’s chair and talked to reporters, “using language in reference to the anti-Ferguson group that no lady Governor would think of, let alone use.”

The lady governor demands that Amon Carter, publisher of The Fort Worth Star Telegram, resign from the Board of Directors of the Texas Technological College because, she claims, he was drunk at a football game.

Hungary will ban foreign jazz bands after December 31st, not because the government hates jazz, which it probably does, but to protect native jazz bands.

Alice Rhinelander will not testify. Her lawyer Lee Davis, who last week made her strip for the jury, says “It struck me that it was just time the world was through with the slime of this case.” Alice is at the visibly-weeping-all-the-time phase of the trial. Davis, in his closing argument, accuses the opposition of attempting to smear everyone, from Alice’s mother to the chauffeur, who was ordered by a court to pay child support for his illegitimate child, which has what to do with his having told Kip that Alice’s father is black?

Headline of the Day -100:

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Today -100: November 30, 1925: They wish to go as fast as possible along the same road

Coolidge’s Aircraft Board of Inquiry rejects Billy Mitchell’s call for a unified Air Force, continuing the existing system of separate army and navy air services.

Texan citizens create a fund to pay for a special session of the Legislature to investigate Gov. Miriam Ferguson, since it turns out that special sessions don’t have the power to appropriate funds for themselves during the special session.

A day after Gov. Ferguson announces a bounty on rich flouters of prohibition law, George Brady, a black butler at the Governor’s Mansion is arrested for attempting to sell liquor to some white dudes. Brady had a death sentence commuted by a previous governor, but his parole was revoked by another governor “on general principles,” he was then furloughed to work in the Mansion, and later pardoned by Ms. Ferguson.

The NYT op-ed page says it would have more sympathy with Ferguson’s critics if she hadn’t campaigned on a promise to let her husband do most of the governoring, a job divided between “an elected wife who confesses small knowledge of how to exercise it and a husband whose record shows that he knows too much.”

British Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill says “The Socialist in his folly and the Communist in his malice would undermine and fatally wreck the pillars of our society. They wish to go as fast as possible along the same road, but the Communist thinks he can smash his way by violence and the Socialist believes he can do it by humbug.” I’ve said it before: we just don’t use the word “humbug” often enough these days.

Gandhi is fasting again. The NYT fails to say why, but it’s a “penitential” 7-day fast after “moral lapses” by some kids at the Satyagraha Ashram.

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Today -100: November 29, 1925: Of booze bounties

Texas Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson offers a $500 reward for the arrest and conviction of any Texan for violation of prohibition laws – if they’re worth more than $5,000. This is her response to critics of her pardons of poor people jailed for low-level liquor offences, such as certain millionaire newspaper publishers. The press conference does nothing to dispel the notion that it’s her husband who is really running the state, as she turns all the hard questions over to him. The Austin American editorializes, “James E. Ferguson Should Cease to Be Governor.”

The Italian bill currently being debated to punish expatriate Italian critics of Fascism by removal of their citizenship and seizure of their property neglects to specify what actual infractions are covered or how the culprits’ guilt will be determined.

The collapse of the Painlevé government in France halted work on a bill to suppress the French Fascisti.

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Today -100: November 28, 1925: They’ve scraped Hell with a fine-tooth comb and they’ve found nothing

The German Reichstag ratifies the Locarno treaties, 291 to 174, and authorizes the government to apply for membership in the League of Nations. 

Bells are installed under each seat in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, just in case deputies would like to drown out, say, a Communist deputy.

Aristide Briand manages to form a Cabinet.

Reporters who thought they’d be having a press conference with Texas Gov. Miriam Ferguson are instead presented with her husband, former impeached governor James Ferguson, described as “a tall, lean, hard-bitten man of the shrewd farmer type,” who explains that his wife is too tired from shaking hands at the Thanksgiving football game between the U of Texas and the Aggies. In the two-hour presser, Ferguson doesn’t quite dispel the notion that he’s the person really running the state, repeatedly deploying the pronoun “we,” as in “We haven’t decided whether we will run for governor again,” and even saying “I” came second in the first primary. He says the impeachment talk is from a dastardly coalition of the Klan and supporters of other candidates for governor next year. He denies selling pardons. He admits that road contractors have been making huge profits, but attributes it to the good weather. He says “They’ve scraped Hell with a fine-tooth comb and they’ve found nothing.” Ferguson, who during his own impeachment 12 years ago refused to say who had given him a $156,000 loan, now admits it was 3 brewers supporting his anti-prohibition stance.

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